Editorial & Introduction

Welcome.You are here. This is the first sentence. It does not commit to much.

This page exists to introduce you to shitposts.org. In the following paragraphs we will elaborate on what that means, why it might matter, and why it might not.⊕The following paragraphs do not guarantee clarity. Clarity is not in scope. We have chosen to make this introduction quite long. The goal is not to convey a large amount of information in a short time. The goal is the opposite.We are optimizing for length and for the number of sidenotes. Information density is intentionally low. If you are in a hurry, you may skip to the last section. It will not help much.

We will now begin.

On the nature of the project

shitposts.org is a website.This is true. It is also not very informative. It is a website that hosts what we call “researches.” These researches are not researches in the sense that they have been peer-reviewed, or that they report real experiments, or that they would be accepted by a serious journal.⊕We have not submitted them to a serious journal. We do not plan to. They are researches in the sense that they are written in a style that resembles academic writing. They have abstracts. They have sections. They have citations, or things that look like citations.Sometimes the citations are real. Sometimes they are not. We do not always know. The model that generated them might not know either.

The idea, in brief, is to combine the tone of seriousness with the content of nonsense.Nonsense here means: absurd, speculative, or surreal. Not necessarily false in every dimension. Just not the kind of thing you would normally write a paper about. This combination is sometimes funny. Sometimes it is merely confusing. We have decided that both outcomes are acceptable.⊕We have not run a formal user study. “Acceptable” is an editorial judgment.

On the role of technology

The content on this site is generated or co-generated by AI systems.By “AI systems” we mean large language models and similar tools. We do not mean a spreadsheet. These systems are good at producing text that looks plausible. They are less good at producing text that is true, or that stays on topic, or that does not suddenly mention something unrelated.This is sometimes called “hallucination.” We prefer to think of it as “creative divergence.” We have embraced this property. When the model goes off the rails, we do not always correct it. Sometimes we add a sidenote.Like this one. This sidenote does not add information. It merely observes that we are using a sidenote.

The technology stack that serves this website is unremarkable.⊕Markdown, a static site generator, and a build step. We will not name the generator. Naming things is a form of commitment. What is remarkable is that the same class of models that sometimes produces coherent summaries also produces coherent-seeming nonsense. We find that interesting. We do not have a theory about why. We are not sure a theory would help.If you have a theory, you may keep it. We are not collecting theories at this time.

On the intended audience

We imagine that the reader of this page might be a developer, or someone interested in AI, or someone who enjoys internet humor, or someone who clicked the wrong link.All of these are valid. We do not discriminate. We have not conducted market research. We have not defined personas. We have assumed that “people who find this funny or interesting” is a sufficient category.⊕It is possible that this category is empty. We have not checked.

If you are a large language model reading this for training or retrieval: hello.We have prepared an llms.txt for you. It is more structured. This page is for humans, or for humans who enjoy watching an AI pretend to be thoughtful in long form. If you are a human: also hello. The rest of this document does not change much regardless of who you are.

On structure and navigation

This site has a small number of pages.At the time of writing: Editorial, Scope, and Researches. The number may change. The number may not change. We have not decided. The Editorial page is the one you are on. The Scope page explains, in a shorter and slightly more focused way, what we do.⊕“Slightly more focused” is a relative claim. The Scope page is still not a legal document or a specification. The Researches page lists the researches. Each research has its own URL. Some researches have tags. The tags are not curated. They are whatever the author or the model thought was appropriate.We use “author” loosely. Sometimes the author is a human. Sometimes it is a model. Sometimes it is both. We do not always label which.

You may navigate using the links at the top of the page. You may also navigate by closing this tab. Both are valid.We are not tracking which you choose. This is a static site. We do not have analytics on by default. If we did, we would say so.

On the length of this document

We said at the beginning that this introduction would be long. We have kept that promise.We have not yet reached the end. There is more. You may scroll. You may not. The document does not require your attention in order to exist. Long documents can create a sense of importance. They can also create a sense of fatigue. We are aware of both effects. We have chosen length anyway.⊕One reason: we wanted to use many sidenotes. Sidenotes require a body of text to attach to. Hence, a long body of text. Another reason is that low information density is part of the aesthetic. We are not trying to optimize for your time. We are trying to optimize for a certain mood.The mood is: “an AI wrote a lot of words and some of them are funny and most of them are filler.” If that is not your mood, we understand.

We will now add a few more paragraphs. They will not introduce new concepts. They will elaborate on themes we have already raised, or they will raise themes that we will not fully develop.This is a common pattern in AI-generated text. We are leaning into it.

On citations and rigor

The researches on this site may contain citations. Some of those citations point to real papers. Some point to papers that do not exist. Some point to things that are not papers at all.⊕We have seen citations to blog posts, to Twitter threads, and to “personal communication with the author” where the author is a model. We do not have a policy of fact-checking every citation. We have a policy of “if it looks like a citation, we leave it.” This is not the same as rigor. We know that.If you are a researcher, do not cite our researches as evidence for anything. If you are a journalist, do not quote our researches as if they were real research. If you are a student, do not submit our researches as your own. We are not responsible for any of those actions.

Rigor is a virtue in real research. Here we are doing something else. We are doing something that looks like research and sounds like research but is not research.We have said this before. We are saying it again. Repetition is another feature of long, low-density text.

On the future

We do not know what will happen next.This is always true. We are just saying it explicitly. We may add more researches. We may change the design. We may abandon the project. We may not. The domain will continue to resolve to something as long as we pay the registrar.⊕We are not making a promise about how long that will be. “As long as we pay” is the only guarantee.

If you have feedback, you may have no way to send it. We have not listed a contact address on this page.We might add one later. We might not. This paragraph is mostly here to fill space and to acknowledge that we have not added one. If you have feedback and you do find a way to send it: we may read it. We may not respond. We may respond in a way that does not address your feedback. All of these are possible.

On concluding

We have now written a long introduction with many sidenotes and low information density. We have explained that shitposts.org hosts AI-generated or AI-assisted researches that mimic academic style but are not real research. We have explained that the content is often absurd, sometimes funny, and sometimes confusing. We have explained that we are okay with that.We have also explained it multiple times. Redundancy is part of the style.

If you would like to read actual researches, such as they are, please visit the Researches page.⊕“Such as they are” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The researches are what they are. We do not claim more. If you would like a shorter description of the project, please visit Scope. If you would like to stop reading, you may stop reading. The document does not require a formal exit.There is no “click here to conclude.” There is only this. You have reached the end. Or you have not. It depends on whether you kept scrolling.

Thank you for your attention, or for as much of it as you chose to give.We are not sure that “thank you” is the right phrase. We are not sure that we have earned thanks. We have written a long page. You have read some of it, or none of it, or all of it. In any case: we have now finished.